Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Wednesday August 06, 2008 @08:51AM
from the because-they-can dept.

Barence writes "Mozilla has unveiled a spectacular new concept browser, dubbed Aurora. The bleeding-edge browser is part of a new Mozilla Labs initiative, in which the open-source foundation is encouraging people to contribute ideas and designs for the browser of the future. The Aurora browser demonstration shows a highly advanced way of collaborating data gathered on the web, and represents a spectacular introduction to the new Mozilla Labs, which much like Google Labs looks to become a home for offbeat projects which would otherwise probably never see the light of day. More details, and a video demonstration, are on the Mozilla Labs site."

The bleeding-edge browser is part of a new Mozilla Labs initiative, in which the open-source foundation is encouraging people to contribute ideas and designs for the browser of the future.

Labs is more than that. Back in ought six, Slashdot covered their first extend Firefox contest [slashdot.org] where people were bated with Alienware swag and developer conference passes to develop extensions & plug-ins for Firefox. The second year saw Shareaholic [mozillalinks.org] come out as a winning plug-in. The third year just finished judging [mozilla.com] and I'm excited to see what Mozilla finds as the best Firefox 3 add ons.

It's nice to see a foundation aiding, encouraging and rewarding the average developer off the street for their work. Even better than that is when Mozilla backs a plug-in or add-on it's usually solid and reliable (unlike the many WinAmp plug-ins that plagued my college machine).

It's the web OS, plain and simple.It's good but it relies on web services a lot. But that's what a browser is for. Dear Mozilla developers, focus on Enterprise level as well. Though it is open source and all, it would be great to be able to configure Aurora to manage private services.

The question that comes to mind is - will it be like the Aurora class ships in Stargate Atlantis? meaning - what are the security features (better shields?)? What are the requirements? (Will it be ZPM-like requirements?)

The similarity with Google Labs is the word "labs" this is about user requirements and suggestions rather than fully fledged products. Its about people suggesting improvements and then those moving into development. This means its at a much earlier part of the product development cycle than Google Labs (which starts with a beta or alpha product).

Saying its like Google Labs is like saying Saks Fifth Avenue is like Madison Avenue because they both have the word Avenue.

The similarity with Google Labs is the word "labs" this is about user requirements and suggestions rather than fully fledged products. Its about people suggesting improvements and then those moving into development. This means its at a much earlier part of the product development cycle than Google Labs (which starts with a beta or alpha product).

As long as we're talking about labs, there's also Adobe Labs [adobe.com] and Digg Labs [digg.com] that I keep my eye on. (Funny, I don't actually read Digg, I just enjoy seeing how they visualize their data!)

While you're right that these sites aren't open to the public, I think it's mostly due to the nightmare of trying to credit people with ideas when you're making billions off these ideas months later. The community might not... like that.

I will point out that the 'labs' concept just seems to be an indication of how these entities see future development. A similarity between Google and Mozilla is that they offer tons of developer resources on their labs sites. I don't think those two are so different from each other.

Instead of looking at these Labs as inferior, I rather give the companies a chance to show me what they think is bleeding edge and a lot of the time it's a good indicator of innovation. However you look at it, it's a good idea to keep an eye on the labs so you know what your competitor/partner is up to and get a glimpse of the future as they see it.

The similarity with Google Labs is the word "labs" this is about user requirements and suggestions rather than fully fledged products. Its about people suggesting improvements and then those moving into development. This means its at a much earlier part of the product development cycle than Google Labs (which starts with a beta or alpha product).

Saying its like Google Labs is like saying Saks Fifth Avenue is like Madison Avenue because they both have the word Avenue.

1) Google Labs starts with alpha or beta products? Have you notice that they then don't progress beyond alpha or beta?

It's nice to see some innovation in software (or in this vaporware stage, at least). desktop software hasn't changed much in the last 10 years. I mean, OS X is a better looky feely version of Windows, and Vista is trying to be OS X. Firefox and Safari are trying to be a better IE. And web 2.0 apps and chat clients are basically better versions of Usenet and IRC.

But there hasn't been anything truly revolutionary in the world of desktop software in a long time.

HL2 in my mind was one hell of a let down - well expected this amazing thing.. and when it came out i just felt hordily let down - yet every one seems to love it - i just don't get it.. sure they made improvements but so many things where over looked that it just seemed like a rehash of the same old.

Looks like a tornado touched down and sent all the guys bookmarks spiraling into a huge disorganized mess. Overwhelmingly craptastic is how I would describe it. I really find this push on all sides to transform my computer from a deterministic machine to a non-deterministic one rather disturbing. I think these are the sorts of tools that, used habitually, will make a person intellectually pliable and mentally deficient. Sabotage the persons capacity to organize their shit, teach them to fuzzy search everything and accept what they receive, throw some corporate propaganda in there to make a few bucks on the side. No one really knows what the computer is going to spit out this time, so they'll accept it. Brawndo, it's got what plants crave...

Did you notice the 3D 'mouse' she was using.
can you imagine having to hold your arm above your desk for hours a day.

I can google something (or delicious or whatever) and copy the link into an IM window WAY faster than that person was working.

The only cool thing in that video was the automatic transformation of data. That idea might come to fruition... it would be fairly easy to create an markup language for data and have a plugin that could re-render on the client side.

This will no doubt lead to confusion with the Arora webkit browser.
http://arora-browser.org/ [arora-browser.org]
Sigh... I spent a good chunk of time finding the name and making sure there wasn't any conflicts out there. And then comes along not only a software application, but a browser...:( Should I change my name or ask them to change theirs?
-Benjamin Meyer

Yah mozilla keeps destroying my names. I have been icefox sense 1997 and could usually get that nick everywhere I went, but ever sense firefox came out it has been harder and harder to get the nick icefox. And now this:(

This looks interesting and it is good that they are thinking about the future of browsing. I liked the ease with which you could manipulate and share data, though I imagine that something that is designed to be that open would introduce some interesting security issues.

I am definitely not a fan of the pop-up frames as you move the mouse to the edge of the window - it is one of the things I don't like about Sugar OS on my XO/OLPC laptop. I don't know if others have had similar problems, but I found them way too easy to trigger and very distracting when you were in the middle of doing something else.

Also, I am not sure how practical the bookmarks/history view is for large amounts of data. It looks like they are taking a leaf out of iTunes' album view. I still use bookmarks instead of tags (not sure if that makes me a dinosaur or not) and I have a helluva lot of them. A visual representation of them versus the existing menu structure would make it much harder to find what I am looking for. It is down to my personal preferences admittedly, but if the end goal is to make information easier to find, I don't think it works.

Oh, and did anyone else get reminded of the D&D computer games with the radial menus when watching the demo?

What is with this new desktop "paradigm" I keep seeing everywhere from this new browser to the new multi-touch displays? Where everything is disorganized and you simply wander through everything tossing it out of the way like looking through your dirty clothes hamper for a clean set of underwear. Call me old fashioned but I like hierarchical data and tree structures.

I understand it's just a concept, but seeing this type of thing everywhere has me wonder who exactly is doing usability and what they are smoking because I want some.

Order? Structure? Hierarchy? How quaint! Don't you realize that no one has any time for that anymore. The new paradigm for the future is EXACTLY to toss everything on the floor and let the glorious God SEARCH order it for you.

The new usability is all about easing the life of the content creator, and letting the computer sort things out. Creating order is boring and hard. The content user is responsible for leveraging SEARCH to find what it needs. Oh, maybe you can throw a category tag on something if you really need to find it again quickly.

This is the whole GMail vs. Outlook argument that I see over and over again. Trees and hierarchy are soooooo old fashioned. This is just a visual extension of the death of the hierarchical structure in our lives.

It is different than folders/directories. It is better. You don't have to know any hierarchy before tagging something. As you indirectly point out, it can have multiple tags, and really it is a helper to SEARCH. It can help organize things for sure, and I find it more useful, ultimately, because it is not hierarchical. But it is not the same as folders/directories.

It really is more like throwing everything on the floor, except you have a magic tool to grab any item you want, so long as you have the right in

Except Gmail encourages you to use tags, which are functionally no different to folders/directories if you just use one.

It's marginally easier to put many tags on one file as opposed to creating one file and then all the shortcuts you want in different folders as they apply. People just don't understand shortcuts. At one job, we had a big bunch of marketing cruft in a folder, 30gb of videos, pictures, etc. So and so would want that stuff in their personal folder and sure enough, they'd copy and paste. Management refused to let us set size limits on folders and so it would be a constant cycle of losing drive space, looking for the new offender, explaining how shortcuts work, making shortcuts for them, then watching some other idiot make the same mistake, then going back to the first idiot who forgot everything you told them making the mistake all over again. And any time we tried to put restrictions on things management would order them removed.

I'm of the opinion that if you can't let someone do something bad, then you won't end up being angry they did it. If people demonstrate they won't listen to instructions like "stay away from the angry bear" and management refuses to let you put the bear in a cage, you shouldn't be responsible for maulings. Doesn't work that way, though.

Google — you could have one central authority organize everything into a single hierarchical structure that's organized very well... or, you can do as good of a guess as possible with lots of help from machines.

GMail — you could spend lots of man-hours neatly organizing your mail into folders... or, you could just search it.

Biology [wired.com] — using humans to figure out causation is best, but using machines to find correlation will work for now.

When you find yourself spending your whole day organizing data into trees, but the amount of data is constantly growing, you begin to realize that it's not useful to perfectly organize everything anymore.

Google — you could have one central authority organize everything into a single hierarchical structure that's organized very well... or, you can do as good of a guess as possible with lots of help from machines.

Yeah, but then it would be a hierarchical officious oracle, but someones already done that so it would be yet another hierarchical officious oracle, which has also been done so it would have to be yet another yet another hierarchical officious oracle, or YAYAHOO!

I think it might work, unless Microsoft are looking to move into that market segment.

Hrm, I agree with your point on letting the search feature organize things for you and it made me rethink my position - I'm not against this type of file storage at all. My main objection is to the display itself, how everything is just floating around with some things standing out like a tag cloud, etc. Another example is the "photo app" where one can toss around photos like they are old photos on a table. To me this is neat, but functionally a bit off for me. I prefer a cleaner form of information display

10 years? It's one of the oldest desktop interface paradigms, "spatial computing" as implemented by Apple in 1984, defined by letting people put shit where-ever they want, and it stays there. The "browser" metaphor used by virtually everyone, but especially Microsoft in Windows 98 and later, doesn't work as well because it allows a lot of strange situations that have no analogue in real life, like having the same "folder" open in multiple "windows" at the same time

Yes, why to add all these effects and nice looking,sci-fi movie-like widgets and features if most users around the world do not know what bookmarks or tags are?
We, technical people, are used to learn new stuff quick even if it is not 100% usefull.
Mozilla needs to remember there is still a gap between technology and users. Internet is very young and there is a lor of people who only uses the address bar... that's all they need.
I do understand all these are concepts but I'm not sure if all this "Minority Report" tools are the way to go.
Usability is not fashion

I think it really shows that there really are different kinds of users out there. There's those like us who prefer a cleaner desktop and some sense of organization, perhaps sometimes almost to the point of OCD (i can't stand having a filled trash bin for instance).

However a lot of the people I interact with, some are technical type users, others aren't so much, who have their desktops littered with icons almost filling the entire wallpaper. Granted I can understand that sometimes even in chaos there is

> Where everything is disorganized and you simply wander through everything tossing it> out of the way like looking through your dirty clothes hamper for a clean set of underwear.> Call me old fashioned but I like hierarchical data and tree structures.

Do you have your underwear neatly folded and sorted in appropriate drawers? Welcome to the dinosaur club! Most people I know leave their clothes on the floor exactly as you are describing. You walk into their house and the entire floor is carpeted wit

Where everything is disorganized and you simply wander through everything tossing it out of the way like looking through your dirty clothes hamper

You know, I'd keep all my clothes in the hamper if I could just say, "Tennis shorts, black" and have it come popping to the top. This is why desktop searching, indexing, etc is becoming so prevalent. Most people don't have any real organization (being in tech support for awhile, I can attest to the directory "structure" on some people's machines) -- so companies

The idea is that the data really exists in one place, and you can, if you want, access it through a hierarchy.

But the new (everything old is new again) idea is that you can also organize everything in a completely different but still the same way. That is, instead of having to manually find all your music on your computer, you have a saved search that contains references to every.mp3 on your hard disk. Now you can have your cake and eat it too.

The purpose of a computer is to do busy computational work. That is, a computer can't create a weather model, but it can read data from sensors, plug the numbers into the human-created model, and then spit out an answer. In effect, computers are there to automate and simplify hard tasks, and eliminate menial ones.

Organization is one of the last frontiers of automation, if not the last frontier. For the most part, everybody has a "system" of organization. There are rules to this system that are by and large

This is just the release of part 1 of a 4 part series showing a mock-up of what a future browser might look like. There is no code, there is no browser, this is vapor-ware at its finest. Additional Adaptive Path, the people who made the video, are throwing a party to celebrate their release of the video.

Well, software development is not just code, there's also requirements gathering and design, among others. I'm not saying Adaptive Path didn't jump the gun, but the coding part is easy enough with excellent developers, design, and communication.

Well, software development is not just code, there's also requirements gathering and design, among others. I'm not saying Adaptive Path didn't jump the gun, but the coding part is easy enough with excellent developers, design, and communication.

Well, the colonizing-another-planet part is easy enough with excellent engineers, design, and communication.

Well, the world-peace part is easy enough with excellent leaders, design, and communication.

If Firefox was designed from the beginning to support concurrency for tabs, then yes, it would have been easy to implement. But because it was designed and coded from the ground up to not... well, it's not so simple.

If it's about fighting IE 8 or Windows 7, we may very well fight vapor with vapor.

Considering Microsoft's huge resources, in order to minimize their effectiveness, we must send them running after their tails implementing every interface idea we can prior-art them with (like they are doing with multi-touch) while we only pursue the valid ones.

If we do it right, they will spend all their resources in futile capabilities and end up lacking on important features their business

A quick scan of TFA doesn't reveal the heritage of Aurora, but the emphasis on web publishng vs viewing, and even the name, both immediately bring to mind the (ancient, but continuously updated) W3C editor/browser Amaya:

It is designed to run in a VM where the individual stores all of their private data on their own server. It supports persistent, threaded instant messaging, bookmarks, RSS, file management, contact management, threaded discussions, web page highlighting, email, mailing lists, and more.

If it sounds like too much, you can use whatever parts you want. All network traffic is encrypted using 3DES after a zero knowledge based authentication.

For better or worse, it is certainly one of the most innovative products in the computer industry, open source or not, but that means that it takes a bit more marketing to get people interested. It's a fairly different concept as far as information management is concerned, but definitely a necessary one.

That radial menu tells me these people know nothing about good UI design. It appears to work precisely the same way as a contextual menu, except that you can't see what any of the options are until you mouseover the button, which reveals an icon (possibly with a label, I couldn't tell from the low-res video). The way the option buttons are arranged around the circle, the chances of memorizing precisely which button performs what task are minimal, since it's difficult to distinguish between a button at 7:00 and a button at 8:00 (when the number of buttons is not constant, as it is on a clock face, which is why I can tell the difference between 7:00 and 8:00 there).

Compare this to the standard contextual menu. You can see all the menu options at once (unless there are too many to fit on the screen and they scroll), they all have a text label, they could have an icon as well (they usually don't, but certainly should if the concept can be represented in icon form), and the interface is already familiar to nearly everyone.

I mentioned scrolling when there are too many options in the menu. Imagine the radial menu interface with that many options on it. Imagine how long it would take to hunt through them one at a time to find the one you're looking for.

I'm hoping that I can tread the line between being appreciative of the creative work that has obviously gone into this, and trying to keep my feet on the ground. I've worked in a lot of software companies that have tried to "design" the "next great thing", and to put it bluntly, I see a lot of that in these videos.

When you go to the Mozilla Labs site, you are informed that these are concepts; ideas that they want to flesh out. But what I think is missing (even to the designers) is the question of how it will actually work. It's blue sky thinking with all the inconvenient "it's impossible" tasks shoved down to the hapless "engineer" who tries to build it.

Seemingly simple things like taking a random table in a web page and building a meaningful line graph out of it turns out to be extremely hard in the general case. I speak from experience here, having been paid lots of money to do it several times before:-) (despite my protestations of impossibility). Random data in webpages (or other documents) are just not structured well enough to do it -- and it turns out that partial success (i.e., it works "most of the time") is mostly useless.

The car industry has a long tradition of building concept cars. These are cars that are not meant to be sold. They are only ideas that might fire the imagination for future designers. But the difference between concept cars and these software concepts (not just Mozilla Labs, but many large companies that I could name) is that concept cars *are actually cars*. You can drive them. These concepts are like pictures of concept cars -- or animated movies of concept cars. It's like saying, "My concept car is the one in Speed Racer".

Like I said, the ideas are interesting. But I'd really prefer it if the industry would build working software as a concept. One extremely good example of what I'd like to see is Englightenment. It often sucked (especially if you read the code in the early days). But the concepts were *magnificent*. And they were demonstrably *possible*.

A person writing a window manager could look at Enlightenment and say, "That's sooo cool, but I need it to be a bit more conservative in some ways" and write something that fit the bill. Looking at these concepts, all I can say is, "I'm glad I don't have to write it".

I can just see it now. The girlfriend (replace with "mom" for the typical slashdot user) sits down at the computer and opens up Aurora. All of a sudden she's swept with a tornado of porn, bizarro internet videos, bookmarked pictures of her hot friends on myspace, etc. Thought that changing the name of those bookmarks to "email" and "lolcatz" was enough security? Not any more, buddy...

I'd just be happy if firefox 3 would run on my trusty, stable Mandrake 10.2 box. It's the only piece of software I've installed that will not run due to dependence on newer pango/cairo things. Gosh, even the latest pidgin compiles fine on this system.

While I realize that webmail is supplanting a lot of thick clients, and that Outlook will be the corporate norm so long as exchange is the norm, it would be a shame if Thunderbird development was allowed to languish.

Are there any other open source mail clients out there that are picking up speed?

Ugh. I really hope they figure out threading. Right now web2.0 is like windows3.11 level multitasking-- One site or plugin starts to eat all of your resources and until you manage to close it or it fixes itself you can't use any of your other (web)apps.

So Firefox should be iTunes and handle media subscriptions, download media, and handle media library functions?

How would Firefox even know which podcasts to download?

Let's say I want to listen to Bill Simmon's BS Report from ESPN. The link the podcast is always different. How will the browser just know to find the link, even if I tell it I always want the BS Report?

Firefox already understands RSS feeds. Podcasts are RSS feeds with a <media> element. All Firefox has to do is queue up all files mentioned in the media element using its download manager, and provide a bit of UI to manage/play the media.

That said, just because Firefox *can* do this doesn't mean it *should*. To do this properly and not in a half-assed way, Firefox would have to essentially turn into Songbird (or iTunes) and bundle its own cod

I sort of agree. It's pretty obvious to me what the next gen browsers ought to be based on, and that is RSS. The browser should be based on RSS, with smart feeds (like Apple's smart folders applied to feeds) and smarter search. NetNewsWire sort of does this, but the browser side of the app is lacking. Safari treats RSS the way I like, but doesn't allow for smart feeds. I can see many people wanting better social networking features as well.

Sounds like what you want is Songbird [getsongbird.com],which,hey what do ya know,it's built from Firefox. And if you want social browsing you have Flock [flock.com],which,hey what do ya know again,is ALSO built on Firefox. If Mozilla wants to know where the "Firefox killer" is coming from,just look in the mirror. Somebody will take the FF code,add their own killer features and there you go. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

And it's funny, they constantly attack Silverlight, they constantly attack Flash and then all of them use proprietary operating systems, they don't seem to have a problem doing it.

Open Standards != Open Source

And then they had the Guiness record thing for Firefox 3 and you went to the website and it had a flash map to show where people are downloading - so there definitely is a double standard here.

I don't see a problem with advocating for open standards while simultaneously being pragmatic about your website design. Even if they were able to make their Flash map using Ajax and canvas in Firefox, it wouldn't have worked in IE so their audience would be diminished.

consumers dont care where new ideas come from, just as long as they're offered at competative prices

That is largely true, and they don't even seem to care so much about price so long as they can grab the install CDs from work.

That's interesting. I didn't take too close a look at the browser pages (what, read TFA?!?!), but I think push technology for browser is the ultimate thing for changing the world.

I mean, current browsers are pull clients, they retrieve data from a server and display it. If the server could push data back to the browser in-between direct requests, then you could build fully working applications, similar to desktop ones. Once you have that... your OS is just a container to run the browser, the desktop becomes